OPEN ARCHIVE

Patchworking Network Structures

In recent years, establishing successful collaborative arrangements and relationships
between university, industry and public institutions has come to be seen as essential in
transforming new scientific knowledge into new innovations and business ventures. The
fit between these very different actor groups has been treated as a contingent factor.
However, little attention has been given to the managerial efforts that entrepreneurs
have make to establish the fit between small firms, university research, and public
policies such as regulatory policies and R&D policies through network-type structures.
New biotechnology organizations are perfect objects to study these relationships
because new biotechnologies and techniques predominantly come from the university
sector (Kenney, 1986; Yoxen; 1984; Zucker & Darby, 1997; Robbins-Roth, 2001).
From the perspective of the small biotechnology firms (SBFs,) this paper analyzes four
different managerial strategies of how to create network structures to deal with the
interfaces between industry, university and public institutions. The research-oriented
strategy, the incubator strategy, the industrial-partnering strategy, and the policyoriented
strategy. The research-oriented strategy focuses narrowly on how
biotechnology firms transform scientific results into solid business plan or business
models revealing the aim of the technologies, services or products. The incubator
strategy is concerned with localization and how to overcome specific types of
managerial problems in the initial stage of forming a business venture. The industrialpartnering
strategy is concerned with how to overcome the problem of bringing the
technologies from an experimental stage at a research lab to be able to handle industrial
processes and full-scale production. Last, but not least, the policy-oriented strategy
focuses on the problem of having products approved by the public authorities. The aim
of the article is to demonstrate how SBFs over time develop network structures through
patchwork-like activities, ongoing and overlapping activities, that serve as a blueprint
for the management